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I have long regarded Stan Lee as one of my personal heroes. I know I would not be who I am if not for Stan Lee. That is why it always comes as a bullet to the heart every time people vaguely try to discredit him for the things he supposedly did to Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby. Some people truly hate him, but they never say why beyond the ambiguous "he screwed over Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko." Somebody actually called him an evil man and concluded it with a bolded "FUCK STAN LEE."

What, exactly, did he do? What is the bad thing or things Stan Lee did as a young man in the earliest days of Marvel Comics?

But please, if you are unreasonably biased or harsh, you need not answer this question because I will be sensitive and I really only want to hear it from a rather unaffiliated or indifferent source.

-Number one, Stan Lee has always been the mascot / main cheerleader for Marvel Comics. He took Marvel's side when the major push started for creators' rights and returning artwork. A lot of people hate him because they consider him a company man who helped screw over the artists.

-Number two, Stan Lee wrote comics using the "Marvel Method," i.e. he'd provide a rough plot, the artist would draw the story, and then Stan would fill in the typical corny dialogue. Depending on who you believe, he even used the Marvel Method to create many of Marvel's most famous characters. In most cases, the artists claim they created the look, the origin, and nearly everything about the characters - yet Stan was given sole credit for decades.

-Number three, Stan Lee became very rich from working at Marvel, while most of the artists ended up broke. That makes a lot of people hate him too.

Stan Lee lies about his accomplishments. For example, he has long told the story that as a child, he entered a newspaper creative writing contest and that he won so many times that the newspaper asked him to stop entering. I read a biography where they checked this story out, and he was listed as a runner-up one time. This specific incident isn't why fans hate him, but I feel like it is a demonstration of his character. "Stan Lee" is a public persona created by Stanley Lieber and promoted by Marvel. The kooky, charismatic genius who cranked out wild characters played better in the press than guys like Kirby or Ditko. It might seem like comic culture now is a much bigger deal, but even in 60's when Marvel first started to really grow, Stan Lee was asked to interviews and college speaking gigs all the time. He was great at it and Marvel gave him as much credit as they could on the publishing side because his name sold books. By contrast, Kirby, though a beloved figure for his work, was known to be a bit gruff. And Ditko, well that's a whole other story, but he definitely was not the guy you want representing your company in the media.

So, the "Marvel Method" (explained in more detail in other posts) gets well-known Stan Lee's name on a ton of books, while the artists do a greater than usual amount of work on any single issue. Now, this doesn't seem so bad so far, it was all just to sell more comics, which is their business right? Where Stan really gets hate is years down the road, when various artists have tried to get credit and compensation for their works. These characters have turned out to be wildly more valuable than anyone back in the day would have guessed because of movies, toys, etc. Stan Lee sided with Marvel and didn't try to help any of the artists get the credit they deserved. Keep in mind that some of these artists were literally struggling to have a living: comics back in the day did not pay as well so they were in tough shape when they couldn't work any more.

Edit: TL;DR It was convenient for Marvel to give Lee more than his fair share of credit because he was good at selling the Marvel brand. Lee never stepped up for any of the artists whose work made him rich and famous to help them get their fair share. Lee is known to lie to promote his public persona.

Edit2: I want to clarify. Stan Lee legitimately deserves a lot of credit for Marvel's success. He busted his ass promoting the company. He wrote various features in the back of issues that helped launch Marvel fandom as we know it today. The "Marvel Method" was a necessity for how busy he was. He just should have stepped up and admitted that he collaborated with his artists.

He does have a notoriously bad memory, which might explain away all the contradictory self-promoting stories he's told over the years if we want to be generous. But somehow his memory works just fine when he needs to remember that he created a character on his own and didn't co-create it with Jack Kirby.

He does have a notoriously bad memory, which might explain away all the contradictory self-promoting stories he's told over the years if we want to be generous

This is a big part of it - Stan Lee claims credit for everything under the sun then falls back on the "I'm a befuddled old man, I can't remember everything" if he's ever called out on it.

When the first X-Men movie came out in 2000 Stan Lee was doing a bunch of interviews and claimed credit for concepts created by Chris Claremont during his 15+ year run writing "Uncanny X-Men". It's not even arguable like the writer/author distinction, these were books clearly written by Claremont with no involvement whatsoever by Stan other than his creating the characters 15 years earlier.

When Claremont got rightly upset Stan basically said "Hey, it was a long time ago, I couldn't remember who wrote what." Most people would refrain from taking all of the credit for something if they "couldn't remember" who came up with it, but not Stan.

Plus, Stan seems to remember things through rose coloured glasses. Many of the characters he wrote were extremely one-dimensional, when other writers took over the characters and fleshed them out Stan would often take credit for those ideas saying something like "Oh yeah, I had always meant to write that but never got around to it as I was too busy creating the character. That's basically my idea."

I disagree, though I didn't downvote and I appreciate the point of discussion you bring up. My main counterpoint would be that neither Marvel nor the artists generally had the fore sight to write contracts that outlined who owned the rights to what in regards to liscensing. In fact at one point (after the characters in dispute had been created) Marvel did present Kirby with a contract that explicity forbid any future legal recourse and it was the final reason he jumped ship to DC even though he was making decent money at Marvel. Marvel wants everything to default to them, because the artists were just work for hire. Part of their claim in this area is that Stan Lee created the characters and stories and the artists just did the artwork they were hired to do so they've already received their fair compensation with their page rate.

As for why artists didn't speak out earlier, there's various stories, some more plausible than others. The most common sense one to me is that they didn't want to bite the hand that was feeding them. They couldn't afford to lose potential jobs because they pissed off Marvel by calling them out about Stan Lee stealing their deserved credit. There's other stories I'm more skeptical of, such as Marvel threatening to sue Jack Kirby if he did work for any other publishers using their house style, which was essentially Kirby's style that Marvel asked other artists to emulate.

If you ask Moore about magic, you'll get a crazy person response. If you ask Moore about things like creator rights, he'll give you an eloquent response based on getting the short end of the stick. In things like this, Moore is more or less credible.

So? Jamie Delano has claimed the same thing. Neil Gaiman claims to have met a girl who looked exactly like Death right after creating the character. Grant Morrison claims to have been abducted by aliens who showed him Barbelith and believes that Scottish people aren't white.

One account you're talking about was a fictionalized account in Snakes and Ladders. The other was obviously tongue in cheek.

Lots of people claim that they really talk to God. Does that mean they're crazy? Or just that they're religious?

Also, it should be noted that Stan Lee actually did the things Moore says he did, so whether or not Moore is "crazy" has no bearing on whether those things happened.

People hate Stan because he gets a lot of credit he shouldn't, doesn't dispel a lot of myths about himself, but mostly because in spite of all of that, he's immensely likable and popular.

Back in the day, comics weren't very respectable, they weren't taken seriously by the general public. Sure, kids bought them by the millions, but you would never tell anyone you worked in comics. You were an illustrator or worked in publishing. So, there wasn't a lot of clamoring in the industry for people to be given credit for every thing they actually did. You've seen the title page in old comics, one little square listing the writer, the illustrator, the inker and the letterer. Certain guys became known for certain things and this would help sell issues. Kriby - drawing, Lee - writing. It was just easier to put that little square in the corner than to say "writer - Lee (pgs. 1-5, 7, 8, 20-22; Kirby pags. 6,9-15, 19) illustrator - Kirby (with help from whoever)." They made those comics using the "Marvel Method" for years. And not a lot of complaining was heard about it then because most guys in the business got along pretty well with each other and there wasn't the fan interaction or the amount of money floating around.

Compounding this were the choices made by executives at Marvel and their parent companies through the years. For decades the business model went that someone would create a character for the publisher, not take a character to the publisher asking for a shot at a book. Thus, when guys started to want the rights to their creations and to see some money come in from other mediums (TV, movies, toys and the like), the company was pretty hard on them and as the face of the company and a Company Man, Lee gets a lot of blame.

To sum up, yeah, there are reasons not to like the guy, but it's all very overblown. Stan Lee is the Man!

Here's something people don't talk about. Stan Lee did a lot to make those artists famous. He cultivated this friendly image of Marvel where even the guy doing the lettering had front-page credit and a catchy nickname. Where do you think Jack 'The King' Kirby got his name? Stan Lee made them all into personalities. Unless you're very cynical it doesn't sound like something a guy who doesn't care about artists would do.

And for what it's worth, I've never heard him claim he invented a hero without an artist. I don't think he takes credit, people gave him the credit because he's charismatic. Besides, a huge part of what those heroes are are made up of the actual words in the book that Stan wrote. How can you not give him credit for creating a character when he wrote the scripts? What would Han Solo be without his dialog? A handsome guy in a jacket, but not a character.

It's as simple as this : Stan Lee became world famous and Steve and Jack remain relatively unknown to the general public. Stan Lee feels that since he had the original ideas for these characters that he is the creator of them and not the artists he asked to draw their first issues. Stan's point of view has remained the same over the years while Jack's changed so much ( Jack even claimed to have created Spider-Man at one point and not Stan or Steve).

The thing that you can't ignore though, is that Jack Kirby left Marvel and famously asked DC if he could take over their lowest selling title (Jimmy Olsen). Jack Kirby got treated like shit at DC, where they regularly erased and redrew parts of his art, most notably with Coletta redrawing Superman's faces because the company felt it was too Jewish looking. Meanwhile, Stan Lee stayed with Marvel for decades promoting the company in hundreds of ways, by going on TV, radio, touring colleges, and working on Hollywood movies. Stan was a better salesman and he stayed with the company longer. He became more famous because of this and many people feel that the real credit goes to his collaborators.

And I challenge someone to find a single interview with Stan Lee where he says Jack or Steve were anything less than the greatest artists the world.

Jack does indeed have some potential legitimate claim that he created Spider-man. More specifically, he created a Spider-man prototype, during his self-phblishing days working with partner Joe Simon. Story goes that either Jack alone, or with Joe (not sure which one's accurate) created a character called the Silver Spider, never published it though. Just kept it in his inventory, most probably because he was working on so much other stuff. Apparently, when Jack was back at Marvel, Stan approached Jack and either said he wanted to create another hero, or asked Jack if he had any ideas. Jack showed him his Silver Spider, which Stan liked, though he changed a few things around and voila, you have Spider-man!
Even if the above story was highly inaccurate, it is a well-known 'fact' Jack drew Stan a first issue for his new Spider-man concept using the Marvel method (or simply the front cover), though while he liked some things, Stan felt it made his underdog character too 'heroic-looking' and so he banddd the project to Steve Dikto (or is it Ditko? I always always forget even after all these years). The front cover of Spider-man's first appearence (Amazing Fantasy #15) was drawn by Kirby (though i think Ditko/Dikto (goddammit!!) redrew it himself, exactly as Kirby had though. Even if Kirby was merely given the project by Lee, he could very well have a legit claim to co-creating Spider-man, the way Dikto/Ditko is (I'm gonna kick myself once I see that name written on wikipedia - cant at mo coz writing on phone). Spider-man could, because of this quirk, actually be a co-creation of Stan, Jack AND Steve. Which is, for a comic-book nerd like me, an amazing idea.
Hope I haven't left any spelling errors in there...writing on my phone is a bitch

I said that because the writings of Stan Lee helped give me an identity and shape my imagination and personality as a young and impressionable young boy. I attempted to emulate Stan Lee, as I thought he was one of the most impressive people I'd ever seen. Therefore, the personality became very much a part of me and that influence at an early age remains to this day. I'm sorry that saying that seemingly offended you so much.

I attempted to emulate Stan Lee, as I thought he was one of the most impressive people I'd ever seen.

This is actually okay. What annoyed me is that you're asking a question about your favorite person but you're not welcome to any harsh criticism or comments about him. It's like saying, "Tell me what you think about Stan Lee... but please don't say bad things about him. Or if you need to, please sugarcoat it, alright?"

It's not that I wasn't welcoming any harsh criticism, I just didn't want any counterproductive comments like the one from the guy who said "STAN LEE IS A THIEVING CUNT" and then proceeded to give no single reasons why he felt that way.

Fair enough. You came off initially as an overly-sensitive fanboy who didn't want to hear a single negative thing about Stan Lee, but now I know what you meant, so I take back what I said earlier, and I apologize as well.